NutraWomen Wednesday: Colleen Madden, VP Innovations, CK Ingredients
“I've always really loved food—flavor adventures, the sharing of food, growing, harvesting, cooking. It really started when I was very young because my mom is a chef. My dad also is a fisherman and a hunter. So I really grew up with an appreciation of food, gardening, and harvesting, all of the different flavor adventures. My grandma actually owned a restaurant too so it was really a big part of our lives,” said Madden. “I come from a state with a really strong food heritage, I actually come from Door County, Wisconsin, where the terroir is really important so that taste of place and the meaning of food is very rich and deep there.”
With food cultures deeply rooted there, Madden stayed in the cheese state to pursue her education, finding her calling in a smaller department at the University of Wisconsin Madison.
“It was when I went to the University Wisconsin that I really found that my passion for food and my love of engineering could come together. So I was able to find a smaller Department called biological systems engineering-food processing. And there in that department I was able to kind of combine all of them.”
The mom of two said she approaches each day by meditating on words that inspire her such as create, strategic and fruition and then frames her day around those idioms.
“It's kind of systematic for me. So I'm really lucky that with CK [Ingredients] I get to harness the power of all of those ideas.”
